The Effect of Soil Moisture Conditions on No-Till Seeder Performanceand Irrigated Wheat Yield

In dry clay soils, farmers irrigate the farm before tillage (pre-planting irrigation or PI) to reduce the soil resistance then tilling when the soil moisture sufficiently reduced for machine traffic. In this experiment, Five tillage-planting methods included direct drilling or seeding without PI (T1), tilling with disk harrow (one pass) before direct seeding without PI (T2), direct seeding at field capacity condition of soil after PI (T3), direct seeding  at high soil moisture condition after PI (T4), tilling with disk harrow (two passes), leveling, and seeding with traditional seeder(control T5) were compared in a randomized complete block design with three replications in terms of fuel consumption, operation time, plant number per square meter, number of weeds and grain yield of wheat. Results showed that T5and T4 with a grain yield of 5287 and 5168 kg/ha, were superior to other treatments. The highest number of weeds obtained in T3 with 42.34 m-2, while in T5, most of the weed controlled by disposing of the disk and decreased to 7.33 m-2. Finally, in the presence of enough water and time for PI T4 was better than T5 and recommended due to the lack of first irrigation and germination of wheat seeds with moisture in the soil, reduced fuel consumption from 34.11 to 11.35 lit/ha and reduce time required for tillage-planting operation from 2.91 to 0.40 h/ha compared to the control. Otherwise, T2 with grain yield of 4734 kg/ha is recommended, due to 30% reduction in fuel consumption and a reduction of 57% in time required than the control.